From Borderless
Vessna Perunovich’s daring actions feel confined in Stride Gallery’s space
Images of Vessna Perunovich’s performances and artworks have always struck me as powerful daring actions and intimate drawings. The black-and-white documentation of her Transitory Places performances created in cities around the world notably European ones with their layered architectural histories has an iconic look. In the photos as in the performances she strains against a long red fabric harness that’s secured to pieces of public architecture. They’re autobiographies of her experience as an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia but these gestures also resonate on a more universal level. Her images and actions speak poetically about political conflict exile from home and being stretched (sometimes violently) to the limits of one’s own body.
The work in Perunovich’s new exhibition Borderless at Stride Gallery is a collection of projections video works and drawings that are installed too tightly in the space and don’t achieve the amazing conceptual power of other recent works that I have seen by this artist.
Bloodlines is a squiggly line of red ink on a thin register of Mylar. It runs from two wooden spools mounted at the top of the gallery space near the ceiling and drapes all the way down one wall loops on the floor over a chair and runs up the other end of the wall to a second spool. The work appears to reference and pay homage to Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll but the line is all blood and no text or rather it is ink that gives the illusion of blood. Schneemann herself discusses moving on from this one pivotal work that gained so much attention in the 1970s so this little scroll of Perunovich’s is overwrought with this baggage whether it is her intention to call up the real bloody scroll or not.
Then there is the issue of the red. A powerful colour whose most potent associations are revolution borders and blood red has reoccurred in Perunovich’s stark almost all black-and-white palette through her career. In the dimly lit installation the colour here a hue of deep bloody ink almost exclusively reminds of blood. This is to great effect as the strongest works in her practice begin with identifying fragility and scale of the artist’s body and prompt thoughts of the fragility of our own bodies in relation to the environments and objects she creates.
Fencescapes are two long drawings on Mylar again in deep red ink. Here her line is more indicative of the process of repetitive mark making as the ink gradually flows from dark saturated lines to thinner watery ones. This drawing of interlaced fencing also looks like a seductive piece of crocheted fabric or a net. When read as a fence or net these drawings seem to be process-based meditations on capture or confinement and tug on ideas of exile brought up in the exhibition text by Andrew King. It’s as if the artist is thinking about all the ways that fences are used to keep out divide mark territory protect and exclude as she’s making these obsessive little marks. The fence stretches endlessly to each edge of the paper with just a tiny space between the top of the fence and top of the paper to suggest the impossibility of looking over or just through.
Installations Infinite Wall and Currency put the viewer in the positions of confinement and of looking through. Infinite Wall is video of a past installation where Perunovich erected a delicate but rigid architectural structure made entirely of thin white string against a brightly painted red wall. The infrastructure of string looks exactly like a long expanse of brick wall and in the video she carefully draws out each line of mortar between the bricks by weaving single strings. The artist hums Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and her humming sounds like a joyful personal meditation to occupy time while performing this labour-intensive task. Stride programmer Caitlin Thompson also describes how the song has been used as an anthem of the European Union and to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall and this sets off thoughts on the heavy political connotations of nationalism walls and territory.
Currency is a similar hanging structure that covers the entire back wall of the space. This chain-link fence is made entirely out of stretched rubber bands with a projection shining through. Perunovich’s minimal projection on the back wall of the gallery looks better than most projections in Stride’s space but ultimately the space isn’t well-suited for large projection works. I leave longing to see more of Infinite Wall. The original installation of this piece would have been the most striking use of Stride’s long narrow space by increasing feelings of confinement and forcing gallery viewers to use their bodies to navigate what is usually physically intense and conceptually provocative work by Perunovich.
